Most Perl 6 will look like Perl 5

Ovid publiustemp-londonpm at yahoo.com
Thu Jan 24 23:09:08 GMT 2008


--- Dirk Koopman <djk at tobit.co.uk> wrote:

> There are different ways of saying the same thing, some new short
> cuts 
> (that are welcome) and some frankly esoteric things that make sense
> to 
> the likes of Ovid and Mr Conway, but will probably take the language
> out 
> of reach to mere mortals like myself.

Actually, have you read the article "And now for something completely
similar" by Damian?  I can't find a copy online right now, but for most
folks, Perl 6 really isn't changing that much.  For example, this:

  my $is_ok = 1;
  for my $t (0 .. 6) {
      if ( abs($new[$t]-$new[$t+1]) > 3) {
          $is_ok = 0;
          last;
      }
  }
  if ($is_ok) {
      push @moves, [$i,$j];
  }

Becomes this:

  my $is_ok = 1;
  for 0..6 -> $t {
      if abs(@new[$t] - @new[$t+1]) > 3 {
          $is_ok = 0;
          last;
      }
  }
  if $is_ok {
      push @moves, [$i, $j];
  }

In short, with very few changes, Perl 6 will be completely
comprehensible to Perl 5 programmers.  (You can even add in the extra
parentheses, if you like)

However, some things in Perl 5 which are virtually impossible to do
will now be possible.

Cheers,
Ovid

--
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